Pages

No bread is an island

...entire of itself. (With apologies to John Donne!)

I live and breathe breadmaking. I’m an evangelist who would like everyone to make his or her own bread. I want to demystify breadmaking and show it as the easy everyday craft that it is. To this end I endeavour to make my recipes as simple and as foolproof as I possibly can.

I call my blog 'No bread is an island' because every bread is connected to another bread. So a spicy fruit bun with a cross on top is a hot cross bun. This fruit dough will also make a fruit loaf - or Chelsea buns or a Swedish tea ring...

I'm also a vegan, so I have lots of vegan recipes on here - and I'm adding more all the time.

About Me

Torn away from the bosom of my family at the tender age of 18 - and never lived in my home town of Blackburn again. The RAF took me to HK; After a hitch of four years I emigrated to Australia and joined the RAAF, which took me to HK where I met my wife of 43 years. I then joined GCHQ which took me (us, with 2 children now) back to HK. Retired at 55, trained as a teacher of adults, gained a 2:1 in Teaching and Training at Plymouth Uni (which I thought went well with the 2 'O' levels with which I left school). And I've been teaching breadmaking ever since. Now running 6 or 7 classes a week, plus the odd Saturday workshop. My passion is breadmaking - or perhaps I should say the teaching of breadmaking; I'm also very interested in early development; And I like to cook - but I consider myself to be pretty average. I have a wife, two children, a daughter-in-law and a son-in-law and three grandchildren, (who can all make bread) who come and stay with us in the holidays and half-terms. Away from my family, I'm happiest teaching a Family Learning group, with parents and children, none of whom have made bread before. I get a real buzz out of turning people onto breadmaking.

Starting at about 8.50 I ran a session in my daughter's class - 23 students, 7 groups of 3 and a pair. I did exactly the same as last week - with one major difference.

"What would happen," my daughter said, "if you didn't use any yeast?" This question came after a fairly lengthy explanation of why we should use lukewarm water to dissolve the yeast. "Why, nothing, really. The dough would just sit there." So then I thought that instead of the one demonstration from me of how I put a batch of dough together, my daughter could also make a batch - only this time, without any yeast . Which is what we did.

Here's the pics from this session:

We did the same in the second session:

Yeast-risen rolls - and unleavened ones!

And the third session:

I had a bit more time to take pics in the last session - and I still got away from the school around 3.20, after teaching 74 kids in the day!